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By David M. HerszenhornTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Wednesday December 26, 2012 6:02 AM

MOSCOW — Russia’s deputy prime minister for social affairs has warned President Vladimir Putin
that a proposed ban on adoptions of Russian children by U.S. citizens would violate several
international treaties as well as an agreement on adoptions ratified this year between the Russian
government and the United States.

The warning, which was made by Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets in a letter to Putin last
week that became public yesterday, quickly widened a split over the measure at the highest levels
of the Russian government.

Russian lawmakers are pushing the ban as retaliation for a new U.S. law punishing Russian
citizens accused of violating human rights.

In her letter, Golodets said the proposed ban, which already has been approved by the lower
house of parliament, would violate the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which took effect
in 1980, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which went into force in 1990.

The existence of the letter was first reported by the Russian edition of
Forbes magazine, and it drew a sharp response from Russia’s commissioner of children’s
rights, Pavel Astakhov, who is a longtime advocate of restricting adoptions.

“Russia will not violate any international legal standards,” Astakhov told the RIA Novosti news
agency yesterday. “According to the U.N. convention, the state is obligated to do all it can for
children living in foster families and, first and foremost, must protect their rights. And we can
see that children handed over to the United States are not protected.”

The adoption ban was proposed by lawmakers as a way of toughening Russia’s response to the new
U.S. law barring Russian citizens accused of human-rights abuses from traveling to the United
States and from owning real estate or other assets there. Critics of the Russian law say that it
will hurt orphans, who already are suffering in Russia’s troubled child-welfare system.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said the president had not seen the letter.